Our Sources, Farmers, and Partners

Butter proudly supports small, local, and independent businesses in our search to source sustainable, high quality and ethical ingredients and products. We believe that building a strong, vibrant local foods economy is a win-win-win situation: more (and better) jobs for our neighbors, a less harsh impact on our beautiful landscape, and fresher, more delicious food for you. This is a future worth fighting for, and we're creating new paths in good company.

Local Food Sources

Our butter: Hope Creamery in Hope MN With a name like ours, we better be working with the best butter around – and you can be assured that we are. Hope Creamery is one of the last small, independent creameries in Minnesota, and each 900 gallon batch is still made by feel.

We truly appreciate the bounty of the Midwest's farmers – overwhelming in the summer, low key and solid in the winter. While we are able to source many local veggies year round through Bix Produce (including greenhouse grown Minnesota Bushel Boy tomatoes, sprouts and mushrooms) there are some other local organizations and businesses near and dear to our hearts because they share our values of community building so deeply. We are pleased to be a Community Supported Agriculture drop site for Turnip Rock Farm, Big River Farm, and St. Croix Valley CSA, and Black Brook Farm. We love getting veggies and herbs from the many local farmers at the Kingfield Farmers' Market on Sundays.

For the past couple years we've even gone hyper-local by growing herbs and vegetables on the boulevard of 37th Street. Come see what's growing and you might just find some of it in your meal! It's an open community garden, so you're welcome to volunteer or share in the harvest as well.

Our turkey: Ferndale Farms in Cannon Falls, MN. John and Erica raise free range turkeys about 50 miles outside the Twin Cities on a family farm now in its third generation. We roast turkey breasts for our sandwiches and make a terrific turkey burger and turkey-sloppy-jo from their ground turkey.

Our chicken, ham, pork and beef: Hidden Stream Farm in Elgin, MN. Naturally raised on a second generation family farm! Lisa and Eric do great work raising our wonderful meats AND coordinate a food hub that brings us veggies, local fruit, and more.

We source most of our cider from Wescott Orchards, who sources apples regionally with lots of care, and from a sweet little Northfield MN orchard, Fireside. We also love to connect with the Happy Hills orchard of Visselli, MN at the Kingfield Farmers' Market.

We work with Sunrise Bank, a neighborhood bank that supports the Minneapolis community and urban development, and receive mentoring from their partners at the Metropolitan Consortium of Community Developers. Our phone services are through another local little guy, Velocity and we're trying to move to fiber optics network connections through USI a Minneapolis based company.

Aspen helps us with our organics composting. And we always give a shout-out to Randy's Sanitation for being a pioneer in the Organics Composting movement and who got us started! We've received great support from Hennepin County as well to build our recycling and composting systems.